


where no man has dared to go

by saiditallbefore



Series: where no man has dared to go [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Gen, Jane Foster Loves Science, Jane Foster/Space - Freeform, Pre-Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 00:39:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19073956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiditallbefore/pseuds/saiditallbefore
Summary: “I built an Einstein-Rosen bridge—”The woman’s knife dug a bit more sharply into Jane’s throat.“A wormhole,” Jane corrected.“You made a wormhole,” the woman said, her voice flat.“Yeah,” Jane said.“And you jumped in it.”“...More or less.”





	where no man has dared to go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boudour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boudour/gifts).



> Also partially inspired by [this fanvid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxMEMq63eco&feature=youtu.be), which remains one of my favorites of all time.

Jane’s ambitions used to be small.

She didn’t think so at the time, of course— and neither did anyone else. The academic community panned her theories and called her “crazy” or “delusional”. The nicer ones just smiled tightly when Jane began to talk about Einstein-Rosen bridges. Even Erik had never really _believed_ her theories; he’d kept an open mind and been willing to support her work, but Jane knew he’d never completely agreed with her on the nature of Einstein-Rosen bridges.

And then Puente Antiguo had happened. She’d been completely vindicated, and had— well, had _met_ Thor. But a government agency so secret she’d never heard of it before had confiscated all of her research, and the town was almost destroyed by an alien robot, and Thor left with his friends to go do whatever it is that alien princes do.

Puente Antiguo changed things. The day in Oslo, when Darcy pulled her away from her work so they could watch the news, horror-struck, as monsters poured through a portal in the sky over New York City— that day changed things. But nothing changed Jane as much as London.

London was where she saw the universe.

Well, strictly speaking, it wasn’t London. But it started in London. She’d harnessed infinite cosmic power, just for a few days, and travelled to Asgard and beyond. She’d seen technology she’d only dreamed of and fought aliens and gazed at foreign stars.

And then she’d come back to Earth.

It had been comforting to be back on Earth, at first. It was home, and she had her work. There was always, always work to do, now that all of the people who had thought she was crazy were begging for her input. When she wasn’t doing her own research— in a lab that was actually somewhat funded, with assistants who had actually studied astrophysics— Jane was lecturing about her work on interspace and dimensional physics. 

Jane tried not to be bitter; she really did. She smiled and made nice with her colleagues. She gave input on their work. Lectures weren’t so bad— as long as she was speaking to students. _They_ hadn’t even known her name when aliens began falling out of interdimensional portals in the sky.

And it wasn’t their fault that she’d held the power of the cosmos in her hands, just for a few days. Not that she wanted the Aether back— she wasn’t suicidal, thank you— but she wanted more than what Earth could offer her.

She knew she had a problem when she learned that she was a serious contender for the Nobel Prize, and the victory felt hollow.

She didn’t go to the awards ceremony. She didn’t even go to Norway. 

Instead, she packed up all her most important research and equipment in her trusty old van and drove halfway across the country to Erik Selvig’s house. They hadn’t worked closely together in some time, but she trusted him more than any of her other colleagues. There were too many people out there who would kill— or worse— to get their hands on Jane’s research, if they understood what it could really do. Erik, at least, understood the dangers.

She let herself in to Erik’s house, using the spare key he kept under the mat, and set up her equipment in his spare room. The research was all on a hard drive that she left sitting in a prominent place, with a note on it that Erik was sure to see. Probably. Eventually. 

And then Jane booted up the equipment, keyed in the correct sequence, hitched her bag up on her shoulder, and closed her eyes.

The world disappeared.

* * *

When she opened her eyes again, Jane was on a rocky outcrop. When she looked up, the stars were unfamiliar.

Her artificial Einstein-Rosen bridge had worked.

Her moment of triumph was interrupted by someone throwing her against the rock wall behind her and holding a knife at her throat.

Jane looked up at her attacker: a blue-skinned, bald woman with metal implants on her face and arms. The woman cocked her head, her large black eyes meeting Jane’s.

“Where did you come from?” the alien woman asked.

“I built an Einstein-Rosen bridge—” 

The woman’s knife dug a bit more sharply into Jane’s throat.

“A wormhole,” Jane corrected. 

“You made a wormhole,” the woman said, her voice flat.

“Yeah,” Jane said.

“And you jumped in it.”

Jane decided discretion was the better part of valor and she could explain the mechanics of how she had operated her artificial bridge when she wasn’t being held at knifepoint.

“...More or less.”

“Hmm.” The other woman seemed to be reluctantly impressed. At the very least, she was no longer manhandling Jane or holding the knife to her throat. 

The woman gave Jane a sharp look, then spoke again. “What would you need to build another wormhole?”

Jane blinked, startled. “What do you mean?”

The woman huffed. “Some idiots shot down my ship and my comms are fried. I’m stuck on this rock.”

“And so am I,” Jane said, with sudden understanding.

The woman smirked. 

“Let me see what we have to work with,” Jane said. 

The other woman turned on her heel and stomped away. Jane hurried after her, scrambling on the loose rocks.

“By the way,” Jane asked. “My name is Jane. Doctor Jane Foster.”

The woman snorted. She was quiet for long enough that Jane started to think that she was being ignored. But finally, she spoke again. “Nebula.”

Jane didn’t know if the name was fitting, but she _did_ know that she had always found nebulae striking and beautiful. Much as this woman was. And, well. She _was_ the color of the Boomerang Nebula.

She had the feeling that Nebula-the-alien would not find that fact particularly amusing.

Jane had never been the kind of child who dreamed of becoming an astronaut or flying a spaceship. She’d always loved space, but from a distance. Even after she met Thor, she didn’t want to go to space herself. Not until London— and everything that came after.

But Nebula’s ship was like nothing Jane had ever seen before, and she felt an unexpected thrill run through her at seeing a real, honest-to-goodness spaceship. 

Alright, so it was a little— a lot— beat up. The hull— was that what it was called? Well, whatever it was called, it was scarred and pitted, and was crumpled in places where it had crash-landed. An open panel on the side had wires pulled out of it at random.

Jane looked at the ship made of unfamiliar parts and wondered if there was even anything she could do here. She wasn’t an engineer or a mechanic. She wasn’t Tony Stark, able to make a miracle from a box of scraps. She’d built or customized most of her own equipment, but that had begun as a cost-saving measure and had continued because she liked it.

But if she and Nebula couldn’t come up with something between the two of them, they could be stuck here— wherever “here” was— forever.

* * *

Nebula was surprisingly good at pulling apart the various parts of her ruined ship and putting them together. Or maybe not so surprising, given the mechanical parts on her face and arm and who knows where else.

Jane had something that _looked_ a little like her original artificial Einstein-Rosen bridge assembled, but it was impossible to know if it would work. Jane suspected it wouldn’t. They had repurposed the ship’s computer to control it, and Nebula was in the process of cannibalizing the ship’s power source.

The problem was that the elements they were using were completely unlike anything she had used on Earth. And while Nebula could, with a great deal of cajoling from Jane, explain what the parts did, she wasn’t a scientist. Even if she had been, she probably wouldn’t have used the same terms Jane had learned on Earth. 

At least Nebula seemed familiar with the _concept_ of science. On Asgard, they had couched everything in terms of magic. It had given Jane a headache to mentally translate what they meant.

The power source for the spaceship turned out to be something that looked like a glowstick. Okay, so it was heavier, and probably considerably more dangerous than a glowstick, but Jane couldn’t shake the mental comparison.

Jane snuck a glance at Nebula. The other woman was leaning against the husk of the ruined spaceship, gazing at Jane intently. “You know I have no idea if this is going to work. We could get stranded again, or radiated, or end up scattered into a million pieces, or—”

“Or we could be stuck here forever.” Nebula straightened up. “I’d rather die quick than slow, anyway.”

Jane considered this, then nodded decisively. “Alright, then.”

Finally, the makeshift bridge was finished, and Nebula stood where Jane had directed her while Jane keyed in the sequence on the foreign computer.

Jane wondered if Nebula was really as blasé about their probable impending death as she appeared. She wondered why she _wasn’t_ more afraid. She’d always been afraid when she faced possible death before, after all— and what did it say about her life that she could think that? But Jane had already left her whole life behind. To everyone on Earth, she was already, effectively, dead. She wanted to live— of course she did— but she wasn’t afraid.

She finished keying in the sequence. On an impulse, Jane took Nebula’s hand.

The world disappeared.

* * *

When she opened her eyes again, all Jane could feel was relief. 

“You did it,” Nebula said. There was something soft in her voice, and the look she was giving Jane was indecipherable.

Jane grinned at her. “We did it!” She realized she was still holding Nebula’s hand, and abruptly dropped it. She looked around. They seemed to be in an alley of some kind. If there were any stars, the light pollution from the city was drowning them out. “I have no idea where we are.”

Nebula stomped out of the alley, pulling Jane along by the wrist. They reached a street, and Jane felt a pang of guilty relief when she saw the aliens streaming along the sidewalk: they weren’t back on Earth.

“Knowhere,” Nebula said.

“Sorry?” Jane asked.

“We’re on Knowhere.” Nebula made a complicated face. “At least we’ll be able to get a ship.”

Nebula’s hand was still clamped tight around Jane’s wrist, so Jane had no choice except to trot along after her. The streets were crowded, but they seemed to part around Nebula. 

They stopped outside a seedy bar. Well, every business Jane had seen so far seemed to be seedy, but this one seemed especially so. Nebula tugged Jane around the back of the bar, to where half a dozen spaceships were sitting.

She promptly proceeded to open up a side panel on one of them and begin fiddling with the wires inside.

“Are you hot-wiring that ship?” Jane asked, incredulous.

“No,” Nebula said. Then, “I’ve got to override this shitty security system first.”

Jane glanced around; a few people were walking by, but no one seemed to care that Nebula was blatantly stealing a ship. She considered leaving before she ended up in some space prison as an accessory to grand theft spaceship, but she didn’t have any money or any idea where to go. And Nebula wasn’t so bad, really. At least she was interesting.

Whatever Nebula was doing must have worked, because when Jane looked back, the other woman was hissing at her to follow her inside the ship. 

The cockpit was a little bit cramped— Jane suspected it was only meant for one person— but that didn’t make the experience of being in a real spaceship any less exciting.

Next to her, Nebula was doing something complicated on the ship’s computer. After a minute, it started up, and they lifted straight up into the air.

Nebula smiled at Jane— a small smile, but a real one, rather than a smirk.

As they sped forward toward the stars, Nebula turned to Jane. 

“Where do you want to go?” she asked.

Jane smiled— at the stars, at the spaceship, at Nebula. “Anywhere you want.”


End file.
